As integrated circuits continue to scale downward in size, the formation of contacts for gates, sources, and drains is becoming more challenging. With fin type field effect transistors (finFETs), as with other transistor types (e.g. planar transistors), the contacts that connect the source, drain, and gate of the transistor are an important factor in the production of reliable integrated circuits with desired performance characteristics. It is therefore desirable to have improvements in the fabrication of transistors to improve the quality of the transistor contacts.